Monday, June 23, 2008

It seems that compiling a kernel for n810 devices involves a bunch of clean compiles, a little offering to the daimaou and some mules for the purple cat (now that I've included some nice narrow references Lou ;).

Issues don't seem to be related to the kernel image itself being too large, but compiling some functionality just seems to make the kernel kill the boot just before the desktop is displayed. These twopages are a good start along the merry road to a new kernel, even one that actually boots. Anyway, after a bunch of compile, download, try to boot cycles I found that you can have fuse, dm, encrypted filesystems, NFS client + server and xfs in a working kernel. I'm still trying to work out what parts of iptables state based filtering makes the kernel crap out.

But with the fuse and crypt stuff I should be able to have some fun making a nice front end to encrypt the internal 2gb sdcard... it will be interesting to see how much crypto impacts performance. I think /usr can be raw, but a bunch of the stuff in /home should be encrypted just because I don't want the guy who steals my n810 to read my email too ;-p

In other news, it sort of feels a little like the start of fight club, but instead of browsing furniture and other crap its hardware. 10G-BaseT can not arrive soon enough.

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Well, my desktop machine is now starting to actually work again after updating it to Fedora 9. "A charmer for the ladies" is the best description of the time trap that was... and still shall be for a few weeks I imagine.

I don't recall any previous fedora being as painful to update to. And then there is the kde4 issue, which I knew about before hand but didn't expect the outcome to be as it has become. So, the issue that finally forced me over the edge in a past GNOME release, not being able to fully hide the panel, was in fact the starter to drive me away from KDE, atleast as my desktop shell. I still love the apps of KDE4, I just use something else for my panel and desktop shell (no candy treats for guessing which wm/shell is at the core now).

It is a shame, I updated to the beta1 of 4.1 and somehow managed to get KDE wedged into a state where it just didn't want to start anymore. even with the old .kde that I started off with. hmm. Though the compositing and kwin stuff is very nice... fundamental things about panel interaction are just not there, or are rather hidden from the user, like being able to rearrange the icons in the panel.

And so it goes that another blog post has fallen, another rant was cut short in mercy for the wasted electrons.